


The Lord Don’t Give Back No Souls

by SaltCore



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Hurt Jesse McCree, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Jesse McCree, POV Second Person, Protective Hanzo Shimada
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-11-13 05:30:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18025616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaltCore/pseuds/SaltCore
Summary: If you're going to die, do it with your teeth bared.





	The Lord Don’t Give Back No Souls

**Author's Note:**

> I listened to "Baby, Pick Up Your Gun" by Kai Straw for a week and this happened.

_There was a goddamn bomb. Right in the middle of someone’s downtown. That’s fuckin’ disrespectful is what that is. Fuckin’ sloppy._

Think all of that in the time between regaining consciousness and your body remembering how to feel, and then think nothing at all as every neuron in you have is swept up in an avalanche of agony. The epicenter is the shard of subcompact Peugeot sticking out of your gut. It breached the metal of your body armor, punched right into the meat of your belly. The wound throbs in time with the shrieking alarms of the cars that didn’t rapidly disassemble in order to match coordinates with you.

You are a dead man, Jesse McCree. People impaled by pieces of car usually are. Fail to appreciate the circumstances of your death—lying in the fucking street like you expected to at fifteen—because the world is spinning around you. Probably has something to do with the appalling amount of your blood that is soaking into your clothes instead of doing something useful. All you can do about that is close your eyes so the spinning doesn’t seem quite so bad.

But then you hear a familiar voice in your ear saying—saying _something_. Focus. Why is it so hard to focus?

“ _Jesse!_ ”

It’s Hanzo. Your eyes snap back open, roam in a broad arc looking for him. Remember the comm in your ear. He’s not with you. The frightened animal part of you wants more than just his voice in your ear, it wants the weight of his hands, the warmth of his body. It doesn’t want to be alone in dying.

“Jesse, answer me.” Tell the fear in his voice by the way he perfectly enunciates every syllable.

“Han,” you groan. You don’t know if you managed the volume needed for the comm to pick it up, but that’s all you have.  That single syllable knocks grits loose in your throat, adding another little pebble of ache to the avalanche.

“Jesse, I can see you, but I’m out of ammunition. Talon is advancing. You have to pick up your gun.”

“Can’t,” you wheeze.

“Jesse, _get your gun_.”

The timbre of that order bypasses your higher order cognition and drives your motor function directly, and your arm fails out to grope for Peacekeeper. Heavy fingers bump her barrel. Shift a little, trying for the grip. That makes the shrapnel drag against something tender in your abdominal cavity and you choke on that fresh hell.

“They’re coming. I can’t—Jesse, _you_ _have to shoot_.”

You can see them coming now, a fireteam of Talon squaddies walking abreast. Their weapons are hanging loose at their sides. They must have decided you’re not a threat.

Decide to change their minds.

Pick up Peacekeeper.

Your right hand trembles like a goddamn leaf with all that weight, so switch her to your left. Close your right eye, because it’s the dominant one and it’ll fuck your sight picture shooting off hand. Your left hand is steady, in that way all inanimate things are steady. It has an inertia flesh lacks.

That’s boon and curse, all at once. Squeeze off a round—obliterate the neck of the closest Talon goon—but your left hand doesn’t give with the recoil in the same way, so you have to take the instants needed to aim again and you only put the next round center of mass, smack in the middle of their body armor. It doesn’t seem to breach, so you have to fire again to fell this one.

Now they rest have taken cover, and, anyway, you only have three more rounds. This is pointless. But you’ve never had the good sense to lie down and let someone kill you clean so why start now? If you’re going to die here, you might as well do it with your teeth bared. Don’t lower your weapon.

Squeeze off another round when one pops their head up. You’re not sure if you hit. You’re not even sure if you were close. Your vision is swimming. Hear more gunfire. Expect the pain of it, the concussive force ripping more holes, but feel nothing new.

Try, really try, to see downrange. Shapes swim in your vision, so muddled you can barely discern the color, let alone whether or not they’re friendly. It takes far too long for your eyes to resolve Hanzo, tossing aside a Talon-issue carbine.

Watch him run to you, almost stumble as he tries to dig out his IFAK at full speed. He skids to a stop beside you, and drops to his knees. If you weren’t hyperaware of precisely how badly you were hurt, the look on his face would tell you enough.

Hanzo tears into the kit, pulls out a biotic pen. He rips the needle cap off and jams it into the meat of your thigh. Know the instant he’s hit the plunger because of the fever warm feeling that radiates out from the bite of the needle.                                                             

This is not going to keep your death at bay, only hobble it. Shiver with the grim reaper’s chill. Hanzo’s hands hover over you, just short of touching, uncharacteristically hesitant. He’s got less first aid training than you, and you’d be advising any poor son of a bitch in your shoes to make peace with their gods.

You don’t have one of those, so contemplate Hanzo instead. You always thought you’d die like this—unforgiving asphalt soaking up your blood—but you expected to do it alone. Having a familiar, welcome face is probably more than you deserve, but you’re not going to complain about it. Even if he is gritting his teeth with barely contained panic.

He digs into your gear, looking for god only knows what. Let him. Resist closing your eyes, because he’s partially in profile and you’ve always liked that angle. He pulls out your IFAK, and jabs your biotic pen in your other leg. The pain recedes a little bit, but you’ve lost, quantitatively, a fuck load of blood already and you don’t think that extra dose is going to help that much.

Hanzo is shouting now, not at you, but at the voice in his own ear. The rest of the team? No, you can’t hear anything. Must be a private channel.

“Yes, I know not to remove it—It’s bad— _NOW_.”

Reach out with your left hand, bump his knee. His eyes snap to meet yours. Think of all the near misses you’ve had in your life. Everyone’s luck gives out someday, and you’ve been too lucky for too long. Suck down enough air to speak, then say,

“Was always gonna be this way.”

Hanzo’s eyes widen and his jaw clenches impossibly tighter. He says through gritted teeth,

“No, you cannot die here. You _will not_.”

Reach up with your left hand. Curl your fingers carefully around his jaw. You can feel his flesh give, but you can’t feel the warmth as well as you’d like. He presses one hand against the metal, digs it into his skin like you are unwilling to.

“Love you.” Mean it. With everything you have left. You’d always thought your last words would be full of piss and vinegar, but this is okay too. He shakes his head, even as he still presses your hand into his face, refusing to accept them.

Then the Orca comes screaming into the space between buildings, sending a cloud of dust billowing up. There’s barely enough room for it to rotate, but what there is is enough, and it swings until the opening bay door faces you.

Miss the precise moment when Genji must have exited the Orca, because suddenly he’s leaning over you across from his brother. Without having to exchange a word, they slip arms under your shoulders and knees and lift. They jostle you as they run, and you bite your tongue until you taste copper to keep from screaming.

You do moan when they set you down again on a low table. Lose track of Genji when Doc takes his place. She’s got her tubes and needles ready for you, and you can’t even find the strength to think of something smart to say about that. Then the rush of morphine hits you, and you’re dizzy all over again.

She talks over you, and you let the words wash past you. Then she starts to move. Try to follow her, but Hanzo tips your head back up.

“Jesse, don’t look down. Look at me.”

Hanzo’s hand is warm on your cheek, holding your head still, but the look in his eyes pins you in place more surely that his grip ever could. Hanzo fumbles with his other hand until it bumps yours, and then he laces your fingers together and squeezes.

Then Doc does something to the shrapnel and in response your reflexes try to make you jackknife in place. Hanzo and someone else hold you flat, and your vision fizzles out and your hearing goes as agony stronger than the morphine runs ram shod through your nervous system.

Realize late that the reason you can’t hear anyone is because you’re screaming. Stop, not because you decide to but because you’ve run out of air. Hanzo is bent over you, close enough that his bangs brush your cheek, and you are briefly fascinated by the shape of his lips as he shushes you.

The golden glow of Doc’s equipment throws strange shadows over his face, makes everything but his eyes sharper. His eyes are still soft and wide with fear.

The morphine and the biotics shroud everything, even Hanzo, in a dense chemical fog. Without the pain, you feel a consuming exhaustion. Even keeping your eyes open feel impossible.

“’M tired.”

Hanzo looks away from you, toward Doc probably, then he nods.

“Go to sleep,” he says softly, running his fingers through you hair. “I’ll be there when you wake.”

* * *

Consciousness is a runoff pound, evaporated to nothing but chemical slurry and algae. Heavy and rank and clotted.

Breathe it deep.

See the red of light filtering through your eyelids. Taste the sour fermentation of your own mouth. Feel the heaviness of limbs acclimated to disuse. You’ve been out a while.

Instinct says the light will hurt, so open your eyelids slowly, a micron at a time. Give your pupils time to adjust. The only color you can see at first is white, then smudges of gray appear. As your eyes remember that they can focus, you see a person.

You see Hanzo.

Sitting beside you, just like he promised.

Hanzo’s eyes are red, visible even from here, and he’s starting hard at your middle. His thumb is tracing nervous circles over the back of your hand—first one way, then the other. His hair is falling out of its bun, tugged loose by him running his hands over it, no doubt.

But the most startling thing about him is that he hasn’t yet noticed you’ve woken.

Swallow, and feel the film of grit and spit and mucus slough off and down. Gag indelicately on that. Cough, then groan, because coughing hurts so much worse than swallowing.

Now he’s noticed, and he leans forward. He hits the button on the pain pump as he does, which is fucking presumptive, but the sudden ebb of sensation is so sweet you forget to be annoyed with him. He reaches out and runs the backs of his fingers over your cheek with a barely there pressure like you’re some delicate glasswork a single misstep from shattering.

Judging by the way he’s looking at you, if someone’s going to shatter, it’s not you.

“Howdy there, handsome.”

He breathes out in a shuddery way that could either be the prelude to a laugh or sob.

“I told you so.”

Grunt an interrogative.

“I told you, you would not die there.”

His self-satisfaction is a vanishingly thin veneer over something else. He must not know he still looks like he’s been crying. He brushes your hair away from your forehead, then adjusts the sheets. Catch his hand as it wanders to fidget with something else and pull it into your lap.

“What’d Doc say?”

“You will be all right.”

He doesn’t meet your eyes, instead letting his gaze roam anywhere and everywhere else. Nervous. Off balance. Unlike him.

“Hey—” you start, but then he blurts,

“You gave up!” He almost seems to have startled himself, but he swallows and continues. “You were ready to—” and there he trails off.

Ready is a strong word.  You might have chosen something along the line of _realistic about the odds_. Still, take his meaning. Fuck if you don’t know how hard it is when it’s him risking his neck. But of course, _he_ thinks he’s invincible.

“We’re a hell of a pair.” You don’t quite mean to say that, but, well, it’s said.

He huffs a small laugh. Shakes his head, but this time more exasperated and fond.

“Agents, Doctor Ziegler has been notified that Agent McCree is awake,” Athena says in her usual calm manner.

Hanzo presses his lips into a thin line, and now, now he meets your eyes. Just before Doc comes through the door, he says what he wouldn’t when you thought you were dying.

“I love you too.”


End file.
